Perusing The Novels

     The Lawyer Who Died Trying is the second novel in the series about amateur sleuth Ariel Quigley. Set in Alexandria, Virginia, this mystery is a bit darker and a bit sexier than Ariel’s first adventure, though just as quirky and funny.

     Thanks to her doctoral topic on the poet William Butler Yeats and his interest in the occult, Ariel is called upon to testify as an expert witness in a custody suit. The client, Jessamine Steele, is herself a lady lawyer who claims her ex-husband is teaching an online course on dark magic and isn’t fit to be a custodial parent. She offers to pay Ariel for her testimony by giving her stock in a fledgling corporation that has a device to capture electricity generated by ocean wave movements.

     Ariel, in company with Bernice Wise, her psychotherapist sidekick, meets Jessamine’s friends, a group who call themselves the Loo-Loo Ladies because in college they wrote a book of limericks suitable only for the loo. They and a handful of other colorful characters are all involved in the wave technology company. But shortly after a corporate meeting, Jessamine discovers what may be a scam in the company and goes to New York to investigate. Shortly after she comes back, she turns up dead. And the last person she spoke to before her demise was Ariel.

     Add to this plot Ariel’s first TV appearance as a ghost hunter, some interviews with people who have their own ghost problems that they’d like her to solve, some spooky encounters with Jessamine’s ex-husband, a burgeoning romance with hunky police sergeant Greg Mason, and the granddaddy of all Halloween parties. And then Ariel’s own life is threatened…by a force from the Spanish Inquisition!

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by Honora Finkelstein and Susan Smily.

Updated: 02/04/2008